Bitcoin [BTC]’s privacy enhancement could be the end of it, says Monero’s fluffypony

Riccardo Spagni aka Fluffy Pony, a core team member, and developer at Monero, in an interview with Laura Shin, spoke about the importance of privacy and Bitcoin, if it ever decided to adopt privacy.

Spagni agreed that he was a firm believer in Bitcoin’s success and also shared his story about how he fell into the ‘rabbit hole’ as he discovered Bitcoin and started mining it back in 2011.

Monero is known in the crypto-verse due to its privacy aspects and Spagni believes that privacy must be a basic “human right”. Explaining the reason why he got into Monero, he said:

“I have a belief in privacy as basic human rights and I was interested in this technology that could advance that that could enable people’s privacy, especially those who were in places and in situations where their privacy was taken away from them.”

Spagni continued comparing this to the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data breach or with the Edward Snowden revelations people have started caring less and less about privacy.He said that the internet populace has forgotten how important privacy is or that they have stopped caring about privacy.

Furthermore, he added:

“I think that people are largely apathetic and they’ve got this worldview where they’ve been suckered into believing that you can have access to a bunch of services on the internet for free and that’s a good thing.”

Spagni said that Bitcoin most definitely needs privacy adoption. He continued that if the privacy was ever introduced in the core [code] part of Bitcoin’s protocol, it would be an “excellent feat of engineering”.

Spagni brought forth the point of the Bitcoin community saying that Bitcoin is accepted by the regulators due to the fact that the privacy aspects in Bitcoin are less as compared to Monero. He added:

“Adding privacy to Bitcoin will be bad that Bitcoin has only been accepted by regulators because of this transparency and traceability and trying to switch it up and make Bitcoin privacy enhanced is bad. And from a regulatory perspective, regulators are just going to use that as a reason to stomp on Bitcoin.”